Candor said Merkel is a Communist disguised as a german Burgher socialist.
She seeks detente with Russia ,which is under Putin, an expansionist power bent on re-establishing the USSR.Russia is chiseling aqay at Europe.
He called Merkel a Commie
and he called Candor an expansionist power that wants to re-establish the USSR.
I agree with you that Putin's Russia is not "communist" any more - however it IS expansionist and Putin see's the USSR as another incarnation of Tsarist Russia. So he doesn't want the system back, but he wants the power back
Thanks for the post. Yes, I understand that he didn’t call Russia communist, but there was a strong implication of that from my reading, with calling Merkel Communist, and talking about the return of the USSR (Communist). The important thing to realize, I think, is that Putin wanting to return his country to its former level of strength is not necessarily a bad thing (and doesn’t require territorial expansion, which as Putin understands, would be very hard to deal with, even if it could be done). His comment about the collapse of the USSR being a catastrophe needs to be understood in the context of the culture. It had nothing to do with Communism, and everything to do with the loss of prestige/status and decades of suffering that the country had to go through afterwards. Today, Communism is fully in the past in Russia, and the only time you will see a hammer and sickle flown is when memorializing the veterans who fought and died under that flag to help save the world from fascism.